The old Lancashire city has become a new spawning ground for hit record
artists, just as it has been for years for English comics and music hall acts.
 Hello Mrs. Brown NEW TALENT AREA. English talent is sprouting from a new area in the old country. No longer are Liverpool or London the only stomping grounds for fresh young talent - although scenes will always be active in both cities. The new point of location on the map is Manchester. Manchester's name doesn't conjure up anything beautiful. It's not a pretty city. It's a city of light industry in the heart of the cotton mill belt, in Lancashire. It has a population of a million and a half, is 200 miles North of London and 35 miles East of Liverpool. The city is old. But it's brisk and bustling. It was the setting for the first of the famed British 'kitchen sink' movie dramas, "Room at the Top" and "Billy Liar", has two exceptionally good football teams (Manchester City and Manchester United), loads of gambling clubs and about four or five top rate night clubs. The north of Manchester houses one of England's oldest prisons for men, (Strangeways), and the south side is bordered by the delightful Cheshire hills. On two sides, Manchester is surrounded by the treacherous Lancashire Moors - the setting for Charlotte Bronte's immortal "Wuthering Heights". People who don't come from Manchester just think of it as being the rainy city - just as they think of London being foggy. TEXTILE CENTER. Financially, Manchester has a great deal of wealth, most of it coming from its giant textile operations. It's people are warm and hospitable - their generosity making up for any gloomy aspects of the city. Manchester recently spent $10,000,000 modernizing its airport (Ringway) which has, in recent years, had its flow of traffic increased considerably. The city also spent a further few million on tearing down its central square and completely rebuilding it. The money was spent not a minute too soon. Because there are now at least a dozen flights a week to the U.S. from Manchester, travel arrangements for groups from the North of England have become increasingly easier. Next week, New York welcomes Freddie, Herman and Wayne, who need go no further than 10 miles from their homes to catch their scheduled flights. BUSY CITY. Manchester may not be pretty or illustrious, but it's much busier than Liverpool. Its working men's clubs have acted as training schools to talent in every sphere of show business. One highly paid British rock artist recently commented, "If you can play a working man's club in Manchester and get applause at the end of your act, you can play anywhere." He was right. Older audiences are tough. They want value for their hard earned money. Young people are well catered for. In Manchester there is a mound of rock, jazz and coffee bar clubs where they sell no hard liquor. There are loads of places for a new group to make a start. Their number is almost sufficient for an act not to have to look outside the city for work. |
We now have three Manchester groups in the American top five. Their success story is not that of Liverpool, which gave birth to a new sound and era in music. Their sound is not the "Manchester sound", and their original success in England was a little more spread out than here. FREDDIE DID IT. Freddie and the Dreamers kicked it all off about two years ago. The only thing that relates them to their Manchester background is their Lancashire sense of humor - very warm and the kind of old music hall comedy which made national favorites of most funnymen from the same area. (Morecombe & Wise, Roy Castle and Al Read.) Later on saw the success of Herman's Hermits and Wayne Fontana. In between, in the British charts, came people like Dave Berry ad the Cruisers and The Four Pennies. They all just happened to come from Manchester. Their claim to fame was only partly environment, mainly their talent and the right breaks. THE RIGHT BREAKS. A lot of the right breaks for several of these groups came in the form of Danny Betesh, one of Manchester's leading agents and coffee bar club owners. Unlike the U.S. where there's a rule preventing an agent from managing an act, Danny also manages talent and promotes concerts. He heads a company known as Kennedy Street Enterprises. He controls Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits and Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders, though each have different managers. He's a soft spoken and kindly man, still under 30 and a chartered accountant. Just as Brian Epstein expanded his empire, Danny's little stable grew into something gigantic. Today, with three groups in the American top five, he still can't believe that so much has happened within three years. Even without his own artists, Danny is used to dealing with talent. Until this last tour, he was responsible for putting Roy Orbison out on his box-office record-breaking British tours, and last month he promoted a package starring Del Shannon. BETESH IN NEW YORK. Danny Betesh was in New York last December. At the same time, the only one of his artists happening was Herman and the Hermits, who scored with "I'm Into Something Good". He made a deal with Frank Barsalona's Premier Talent for representation of the act in the U.S. Barsalona in turn made a deal with Dick Clark. Later on Betesh gave Premier Talent his entire stable. Herman's Hermits will be here for seven weeks, arriving around the 19th. They go out on the Dick Clark package, guest on 'Hullabaloo' (may 4), and are scheduled for an Ed Sullivan Show on June 6. Freddie and The Dreamers' American success is like a fairy tale. They made appearances on "Shindig" and "Hullabaloo" and they now have the number one single in the country with "I'm Telling You Now" on Tower. They're also scoring heavily on Mercury with "I Understand", and are represented by two albums in the charts. MUSIC HALL HIT. Talking of records, it's an old Lancashire music hall song, "Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter" which has set Herman (the one with the tooth) on to new success. This song, which was a favorite of beloved British music hall comedian George Formby - he used to sing it and play it on his old ukelele - gave Herman's Hermits the added bonus of a few extra hundreds of thousand discs. Freddie and the Dreamers come here on April 19. They fly straight to Chicago and play a couple of other dates before guesting on the Ed Sullivan Show on April 25. It is understood that reaction to their scheduled appearance on Sullivan has been tremendous. They cut into a movie schedule to make their trip, and return to England on April 27. Joe Levine has now set a release date on "Seaside Swingers", and we can expect to see this open on June 16. |